ade to Pope Hormisdas by the
eastern bishops and emperor, does not prove that they belong to the Pope
and were inherited by him from St. Peter, what proof remains to be offered?
If the attribution is so proved, what is there in the papal power which is
not divinely conferred and guaranteed? Neither the first Leo, nor the first
Gregory, nor the seventh Gregory, nor the thirteenth Leo, ask for more; nor
can they take less.

If St. Gregory exercised this authority in a ruined city, over barbarous
populations which had taken possession of the western provinces, over
eastern bishops who crouched at the feet of an absolute monarch, over a
rival who, with all the imperial power to back him, did not attempt to deny
it, how could a greater proof of its divine origin be given?

In this respect boundless disaster offers a proof which the greatest
prosperity would have failed to give. Not even a Greek could be found who
could attribute St. Gregory's authority in Rome to his being bishop of the
royal city. The barbarian inundation had swept away the invention of
Anatolius.

But this very time was also that in which the heresy whose leading doctrine
was denial of the Godhead of the Church's founder came from a threatening
of supremacy to an end. In Theodorick Arianism seemed to be enthroned for
predominance in all the West. His civil virtues and powerful government,
his family league of all the western rulers,--for he himself had married
Andefleda, sister of Clovis, and had given one daughter for wife to the
king of the Vandals in Africa, and another to the king of the Visigoths in
France,--was a gage of security. In Gregory's time the great enemy has laid
down his arms. He is dispossessed from the Teuton race in its Gallic,
Spanish, Burgundian, African settlements. Gregory, at the head of the
western bishops who in every country have risked life for the faith of
Rome, has gained the final victory. One only Arian tribe survives for a
time, ever struggling to possess Rome, advancing to its gates, ruining its
Campagna, torturing its captured inhabitants, but never gaining possession
of those battered walls, which Totila in part threw down and Belisarius in
piecemeal restored. And Gregory, too, is chosen to stop the Anglo-Saxon
revel of cruelty and destruction, which has turned Britain from a civilised
land into a wilderness, and from a province of the Catholic Church to
paganism, from the very time of St. Leo. Two tribes were the most